If I had to choose one item from my scrapbook to show how the idea for Ghost Girl first came about, I would choose this photograph—a picture from the 1890s of a young woman with a rifle mounted on a pack mule, ready to ride off into the hills of northern California. As soon as I laid eyes on this memorable photo at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, I wanted to know more about the teenager in the picture, who went by the name of Lou and grew up to become the First Lady of the United States in 1928. With just a few days of research at the Hoover Library, I learned that Lou Henry Hoover had led a life full of travel and adventures that took her around the globe several times, taught her to speak at least three languages, and even brought her through the thick of battle in China and Europe.

But the solemn portraits and profiles of Mrs. Hoover during her White House years reveal very little of that rifle-toting, trailblazing side of her personality that shines through in the photographs from her younger days. With this in mind, I set out to write a biography that would include the little-known stories of Lou Henry Hoover’s exciting accomplishments before she ever reached the White House.

So how did the biography Lou Henry Hoover First Lady of Adventure turn into Ghost Girl, a novel about a careworn eleven-year-old named April Sloane from the Blue Ridge Mountains? The transformation started after I had already spent months researching the presidential papers at the Hoover Library. Then one day I came upon a fascinating file box full of letters and newspaper articles related to a schoolhouse the Hoovers had built for the children living in the hollows near their summer fishing camp in Virginia.

One of the newspaper articles from 1930 featured a photo of the students, some barefoot and dressed in tattered overalls making their way past hordes of  reporters who had come from across the nation to witness the opening day of the President’s Mountain School. Other photos scattered among the documents showed the children on the schoolhouse steps gathered around the First Lady and Christine Vest, the pretty young woman from Kentucky who became their teacher.

No matter how hard I tried to move on with my biography, I kept coming back to the ragtag collection of faces in those photographs. I wondered what it would have been like for those kids—many who had never ventured beyond their mountain hollows—to suddenly have the President and First Lady of the United States as next-door neighbors? What would it be like to go to school for the first time at the age of twelve or sixteen? Or how did those children feel when they made their very first trip down to the valley to attend the Madison County Fair?

Of course I kept telling myself I would return to my biography research soon enough, but before long, I was making a trip to Virginia to spend time at the Shenandoah National Park, where the Hoover school remained in operation until the government forced the local families out of their homes to make room for the park in the late 1930s. Although visitors can still tour the Hoover’s fishing retreat called Camp Rapidan, the schoolhouse is gone—moved from its original site years before. At the time of my visit, it had been remodeled beyond recognition and was serving as an office building for park rangers. I was even more disappointed to realize that firsthand information about the former students was scarce in the park archives, mainly because of the long history of bitter feelings between organizers of the Shenandoah National Park and the people who were displaced from their land for its creation.

Yet my search through the archives did uncover one small goldmine: a typed copy of an interview with a woman who had actually attended the Hoover school back in the 1930s. While answering questions about her childhood in the Blue Ridge, this woman briefly described her memories of a tragic accident in her family’s mountain cabin, which had resulted in the death of her youngest sister.

She revealed: I never will forget that the day my sister burned was the day my father ordered the Victrola and some records. She was six years old, and she was so glad that he’d ordered one. We didn’t play it after we got it for a long time . . . and then when we did play it, it about killed all of us.

Once I stumbled upon those three memorable sentences, the character of April Sloane and the story at the heart of Ghost Girl gradually came to life in my mind.

So what ever happened to that biography of Lou Henry Hoover? The truth is I never did return to the project, but Mrs. Hoover plays a starring role in Ghost Girl and all of those months of research into her exciting past became crucial in shaping the novel. Finding this story taught me that the road to creating a book can be full of unexpected detours and that it’s never a waste of time to explore these wandering side streets of ideas. In fact, sometimes the best views appear when you take the long way ’round.

All photos courtesy of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa

Take a look at what went into the research for Singing Hands